The crippling defect of Communist economies by this time was endemic, ideologically-induced inefficiency. Because of an unbending insistence upon the importance of primary industrial output for the ‘construction of socialism’, the Soviet bloc missed the switch from extensive to intensive, high-value production that transformed Western economies in the course of the Sixties and Seventies. Instead it remained reliant upon a much earlier model of economic activity, redolent of Detroit or the Ruhr in the 1920s, or late nineteenth-century Manchester.
